We address the paradox that financial innovations aimed at risk-sharing appear to have made the world riskier. Financial innovations facilitate hedging idiosyncratic risks among agents; however, aggregate risks can be hedged only with liquid assets. When risk-sharing is primitive, agents...

I will address in this study the future of banking. This will be done against the backdrop of revolutionary forces shaping an increasingly fast-moving banking landscape. The first part of the study focuses on the ultra-long drivers of banking structures and institutions. To that end, I will...

Being active in both the insurance sector and the banking sector, financial conglomerates intrinsically increase the interconnections between the banking sector and the insurance sector. We address two main concerns about financial conglomerates using a unique database on bilateral exposures...

We study the dependence between the downside risk of European banks and insurers. Since the downside risk of banks and insurers differs, an interesting question from a supervisory point of view is the risk reduction that derives from diversification within large banks and financial...

This paper reviews the state of the banking sector in Europe. At the aggregate level, the empirical data suggest that the Baltics, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland, in particular, are hit by a strong decline in lending in the wake of the financial crisis. This deleveraging is mainly caused by a...

The simultaneous activation of many sources of risk can slow bank operations and even lead to bankruptcy. Credit risk is the greatest threat to the orderly functioning of a bank. To protect against its materialization banks spend nearly 90% of their total capital requirement. Concentration of...

Insured depositors have no reason to care how their banks perform or how safe they are. Only uninsured depositors have that incentive. This paper offers a plan to replace some insured deposits with uninsured deposits. The plan: the FDIC would guarantee loan contracts if the loan takers deposited...

This paper assesses the reputational impact of announced operational losses for a sample of 163 listed financial companies from 1994 to 2008.Measurement of reputational losses is carried out using the event study methodology.The results show that fraud is the event type that generates the...

This paper considers the issue of forecasting financial fragility of banks and insurances using a panel data set of performance indicators, namely distance-to-default, taking unobserved common factors into account. We show that common factors are important in the performance of banks and...